When the first one was released back in 1977 it was phenomenal — a pulpy space opera with dialogue that had the panache of a Hugo Gernsback short story, and we liked it. Then came the sequel, and we were overjoyed…it was still good old fashioned science fiction, but it was better than the first. And from that point on, unfortunately, it was dissolution and decay, beginning with the Ewoks and ending in the terminal embarrassment of Jar Jar Binks. Yet Lucas keeps tinkering with the sell-out garbage, trying to restore that brief moment of magic by hammering it all flatter and paving it over with a virtual steamroller of reprocessing and rewriting.

Nothing will save them, George. They were badly conceived and badly written, and yet another digital makeover will not change that fact. Maybe if you’d written them competently when you made them, you wouldn’t be masturbating their corpses now.